PAST CONCERTS BLOG

Our
35th anniversary concert celebrates the music of composers who have
a connection to Brooklyn. Aaron Copland
and George Gershwin were born here.
Benjamin Britten found refuge here during World War II. The living composers featured on the program
are organists, music directors, orchestrators, teachers and professors who
continue to be shaped by Brooklyn’s dynamic cultural forces.

Song of the Universal-David Snyder (Text by Walt Whitman)

David
Snyder’s multi-faceted career as a composer, musical director, orchestrator and
performer has taken him from the scoring stages of Hollywood to Carnegie Hall,
where he currently serves as principal arranger and pianist for the New York
Pops. He has had the honor of conducting
for Tony Award winners Christine Ebersole and Nell Carter, and has worked
closely with artists ranging from Andy Williams and Debbie Reynolds to Clay
Aiken, The Manhattan Transfer, and Francis Ford Coppola. After studying with Henry Mancini, Allyn
Ferguson, Joe Harnell and Buddy Baker at the Grove School of Music in Los
Angeles, David went on to compose music for several independent films. A
Brooklyn-themed program would not be complete without paying tribute to Walt
Whitman who lived and worked in the Borough at different times in his life.

Hymn
to St. Cecilia, Op. 27 -Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

Benjamin
Britten was born in Suffolk, England on November 22, 1913, St. Cecilia’s Day,
and went on to be one of the central figures of 20th century British
classical music. His compositions
represent a wide variety of genres, including operas, film scores, orchestral works
and choral works. He met W. H. Auden in
1935 while composing music for documentary films produced by the General Post Office. This friendship led to numerous collaborative
efforts. In 1939, Britten followed Auden
to the United States and moved into 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights as a
conscientious objector to World War II.

Britten
asked Auden to write a text for his ode to St. Cecilia and began setting it to
music in late 1940. Unfortunately, customs inspectors confiscated Britten’s
scores, fearing they were some type of code, when he decided to return to
England in 1942. Britten reconstructed
the score and published it shortly thereafter.

A
Garden (text by William Blake)- Jonathan Elliott

A
Garden is a choral song cycle, settings of poems by William Blake, commissioned
by Saint Ann’s School in 1990 and composed at the MacDowell Colony in
Peterborough, New Hampshire. I was
provoked by Blake’s poetry, concise and direct, vivid in its imagery, and
nearly perfect. Each of these five
songs is a setting of a complete poem from Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and
Experience.” These poems, published in
1789, are concise and direct, are ideal vehicles for musical imagination. The cycle of five songs takes the shape of a
short symphony, beginning with a slow introduction—the chant-like setting of
“Garden of Love—and going on to the swift and jubilant “Pretty Rose Tree,” a
waltz in “Ah! Sunflower,” a scherzo
(“The Lilly”), and finally the dramatic eerie finale, “The Sick Rose.”
---Jonathan Elliott

Jonathan
Elliott's music is notable for its communicative power, imagination, and
thoroughly modern expression, Elliott's music is performed in the US, Europe
and Asia by leading concert artists and broadcast internationally. A native of
Philadelphia, Elliott studied with Annea Lockwood at Vassar and subsequently on
a University Fellowship with Ralph Shapey and Shulamit Ran at the University of
Chicago, receiving a PhD in Composition. Elliott has lived in Brooklyn, NY, since 1988.
A visual artist as well as musician, he
is composer in residence and co-chair of the music department at Saint Ann's
School in Brooklyn Heights.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot John
Brian McAnuff

John
Brian McAnuff was born in Brooklyn on July 5, 1936. After studying organ with Robert Arnold at
Trinity Church, Wall Street, he attended The Mannes College of Music,
continuing his study of the instrument with Edgar Hilliar. Shortly after his graduation in 1970, Mr.
McAnuff was offered the post of Music Director at St. John’s Episcopal Church
in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a position he held until his retirement in 2005.

Gregory
Eaton has been the Director of Music and Organist of St. Ann & the Holy
Trinity Church since 1993. At St. Ann’s he plays the landmark E.M. Skinner
organ of 1925. A graduate of the
University of Redlands, California, his major teachers have been Eva Clover in
piano, Jeffrey Rickard in conducting, and Dr. Leslie Spelman in organ. An
invitation to join the music staff of Trinity Church, Wall Street, brought Mr.
Eaton to New York in 1984. After two years at Trinity, he served as Director of
Music of the Church of the Epiphany in Manhattan, prior to accepting the
position at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity.
Concurrent with most of these appointments, Mr. Eaton was Lecturer in
Church Music of the General Theological Seminary, from 1984-2006. In addition
to his church music activities, Mr. Eaton is also, with David Hurd, one of the
co-founders of Chelsea Winds recorder ensemble, and an occasional composer of
both sacred and secular music.

This
setting of O Salutaris Hostia was composed in 2002. The text is a section of one of the
Eucharistic hymns written by St. Thomas Aquinas for the Feast of Corpus
Christi.

Love
Bade Me Welcome (Text by George Herbert) David
Hurd

David
Hurd was born in Brooklyn on January 27, 1950. Prior to his under-graduate
studies at Oberlin College, he attended both the High School of Music and Art
and the Juilliard School. He was appointed to the faculty of Duke University in
1972 concurrent with graduate studies at the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill. In 1973 he returned to New York as Organist and Music Director at
the Chapel of the Intercession, a position he retained until 1978. In 1976 he
was appointed to the faculty of The General Theological Seminary in New York
City where he is presently Professor of Church Music and Organist. In addition,
has served as Director of Music at All Saints Church, New York City, from 1985
to 1997 and is currently Director of Music at The Church of the Holy Apostles. He has been a visiting lecturer at the Yale
Institute of Sacred Music and a visiting professor at the Yale School of Music.

The
Quinceañera Matthew Henning

Matthew Henning debuted onstage as a keyboardist in Passing Strange, after first overseeing transcription of the rock
musical on Broadway and at The Public Theater. He was Associate Composer of The
Bridge Project's Richard III, a joint
production of BAM and London's Old Vic, and Driving
Miss Daisy on Broadway and the West End. His scoring for television has
earned multiple Emmy nominations and a commercial Telly award.

The
Quinceañera sets a Mexican-American girl’s fifteenth birthday fiesta, an
important, often elaborate celebration marking the transition from childhood to
womanhood. In the US, the fiesta incorporates European, Native, Middle Eastern,
and even Hollywood narratives. Above all it is a great party that brings a girl’s
family, extended family, and community together.

From The Tender Land- Aaron Copland
(1900-1990)

The
Promise of Living and Stomp Your Foot

Aaron
Copland was born on November 14, 1900, in Brooklyn and was the youngest of five
children. The family lived above a
department store, which they owned in Prospect Heights on the corner of Dean
Street and Washington Avenue. Copland
commanded a central role in this country's musical life for almost seventy
years as a composer, conductor, writer and lecturer, teacher, advocate of
modern music, and a founder of the American Composers Alliance and the
Tanglewood Festival. The Tender Land was
composed between 1952 and 1954, and was intended for a television
audience. After it was rejected, the
opera received its first performance by the New York City Opera in 1954. These two choruses are highlights from the
opera, which tells the story of a farm family in the Midwest.

Selections
from Porgy and Bess George Gershwin
(1898-1937)

Summertime

It Ain’t Necessarily So

Oh Lawd, I’m On My Way

George
Gershwin was born in Brooklyn to the parents of Jewish immigrants from Odessa. He
began his musical career as a song-plugger on Tin Pan Alley, but was soon
writing his own pieces. Gershwin’s first published song, When You Want ‘Em, You Can’t Get ‘Em, demonstrated innovative new
techniques, but only earned him five dollars. In 1924, George collaborated with
his brother, lyricist Ira Gershwin, on a musical comedy “Lady Be Good”. It
included such standards as “Fascinating Rhythm” and “The Man I Love.” It was
the beginning of a partnership that would continue for the rest of the
composer’s life. In the same year,
Gershwin composed his first major classical work, Rhapsody In Blue for orchestra and piano. Porgy
and Bess was first performed in 1935 and
featured an entire cast of classically trained African-American singers-a
daring artistic choice at the time.